When you’re thinking about fast-food, what brand do you think of when you hear the word “fast”? (McDonald’s)
When you think about cell phone providers, who do you think of when you hear the word “network”? (Verizon)
When you think about television stations, who do you think of when you hear “sports”? (ESPN)
See where I’m going with this? These word association answers aren’t by accident. Each of these brands pumped lots and lots of money into marketing campaigns to “win” the word that they more or less “own.” Does your product/brand own a certain word(s) in it’s category? If not, then I’d argue that it isn’t a very well-positioned brand.
To make matters even harder, it’s extremely difficult, even impossible, to try to “win” a word from someone else who has already taken ownership of the word. In The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, they use the example of Burger King, which, back in the day, tried to steal “fast” from McDonald’s. The only problem was that McDonald’s already had a death grip on fast. Not until later, when Burger King abandoned the fast did it begin to turn itself around.
So, since I’ve been thinking lately about how traditional marketing principles fit into social media and digital marketing, I of course wanted to see where social media fits in here, and there’s no doubt that it does fit.
Social media gives you another tool to add to your arsenal to position your product and communicate this to the customer. You can be sure to highlight it in your bio on social sites, build your SEO strategy around that word, and, if appropriate, drive the word home in your messaging through blog posts, videos, and tweets.
If you sell a product that you want to differentiate based on the durability of the product, create a series of videos where you try to all but destroy your product to no avail. Or even encourage content creation from your customers by telling them to send in pictures where they used your product in treacherous conditions. Whatever you’re doing in social media, do it with your target word/attribute in mind and ask whether it reinforces that word or not.
One of the neat things about the digital space is it can provide you pretty good feedback on how successful you’ve been in staking a claim on that specific word. Using monitoring tools, you can see whether or not the customers that are talking about your brand online are using the “word” you want when talking about your brand. If your monitoring tool spits out a word cloud of the most popular words used with your product, you better hope your word is a common one. Heck, you may even find out that your customers’ perception of your product is completely different from what you thought.
So, to sum it all up, social media is another valuable tool at your finger tips that can help you position your product and strengthen that positioning among your customer base. It isn’t meant to replace your traditional marketing, rather to complement it and strengthen it.
In what other ways can social media help you stake a claim on that word you’re gunning for?
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Great thoughts here, Jackie. I would say that these words that brands own become stuck in our heads through ad campaigns that create a memorable mental image. These days the ad world is changing in a way that transfers the company's same messages onto different platforms. Only now, these new platforms create a different system of conversation and dialogue that was never present before. When being social on behalf of a brand/product/client/yourself, it is important to keep the messages and words behind the brand in your mind, but to also not let those messages/words overrun the human factor of social media. Being human and conversing are what these social tools are all about. Turning a conversation into a traditional television ad is the one-way communication that is turning people off from traditional channels.
Great point, Rich, and one that I should have spent more time talking about in the post probably. Even though social media is a tool that you can use to reinforce the traditional channels' messaging, it definitely has to be approached differently. Your approach can't be one that the reader/viewer perceives as a sales pitch or marketing message, because that loses all of your authenticity in the medium.
Great comment and thanks for taking the time to write it!
This is great, Jackie. I don't think we can hear enough that you can't be all things to all people.
It seems to me like the social space would make it even more necessary to streamline your message, because there are already so many messages flying by our eyes on a daily basis.
Good point, Caleb. With an already overwhelming amount of messaging, people who are your fans/followers probably want your messaging to be dependable and predictable (in terms of the type of content, not in terms of it being boring). If what they expect helps reinforce your positioning, then that's money!
Great post Jackie! As a marketer, this is a key concept that we obsess over: what space in the customer's mind does our brand occupy? My marketing professor said, and I think about this a lot: a brand should be like your friend – you should be able to describe it in very few words. Listening across social media is a great idea to understand what people are saying, and if it lines up with what you think they are saying. In the Biz360 Community platform, we have a tool that produces tag clouds, which makes visualization easy.
Cheers!
Maria Ogneva, Biz360
@themaria @biz360
Well said, Maria. If you can describe your brand in such few words, that means you have a very targeted approach to how you will position and market your product and won't have as hard of a time determining whether a certain marketing opportunity “fits” your brand.
This is actually very close to the post that I'm just about to sit down and write! Check back tomorrow. Thanks for stopping by!
Rocking post Jackie.
I totally agree themaria as she said Listening across social media is a great idea to understand what people are saying, and if it lines up with what you think they are saying. In the Biz360 Community platform, we have a tool that produces tag clouds, which makes visualization easy.
You have done a tremendous job here in this post.Keep on sharing such beautiful ideas and experience through posts…!!
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